Which Child Abuse Reports Matter? with Melanie Nadon, Ph.D., MPA

Teresa: Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten.  In today’s episode, Which Child Abuse Reports Matter? I speak with Dr. Melanie Nadon, researcher at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Now, as child abuse professionals, virtually, all of us have made a child abuse report ourselves, so we know this from the inside out, both from reporting it and very often from training others on how to make mandatory reports.

But, what do we know about the relationship between who makes that report and how likely it is that it’s taken seriously and ultimately substantiated? What if I told you that educators who are the most likely to report abuse are the least likely to have those reports? Were substantiated. Surprised? I was too.

What contributes to that disparity? How do we refine our mandatory reporting training to ensure that those cases that need to be reported are, but also that we’re not contributing to over-reporting, and how do we work toward public policy solutions to ensure that children and families have the resources that they need to thrive?

I know you’ll be as interested in this conversation as I was. Please take a listen.

Welcome to One in Ten.

Melanie: Hi Teresa, thanks so much.

Teresa: So, let’s kind of start at the beginning. What brought you to this work examining the relationship between mandatory reporting and outcomes?

Melanie: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think there’s a couple of things that motivated this study and my interest in this area. I think one of the first things was We saw a really drastic shift in welfare referrals during the pandemic. And this paper is written, obviously, with my great colleagues, Keunhye Park, Joyce Lee, and Morgan Wright. And Keunhye had looked at some of the differences in the state of Michigan, in particular, around what happened when schools closed during the pandemic.

And we see this dramatic drop in referrals from schools. And I was really curious, looking at that paper and that evidence from COVID, What does that mean for other socio political shifts in our society, right? What happens, you know, when we have recessions or when there are shifts in local politics or federal politics?

And so, a big motivation for this was just that we saw this big shift that happened as a result of the pandemic, and we really had very little evidence about how referral sources change. in response to other differences or other, um, more local changes. So that was a big piece of it. And I think the other piece for me was really just that we know in the context of child welfare policy that there are a lot of problems.

There’s a lot of disparities by race and by income. And a lot of scholars have argued that this starts at the point of referral, but we don’t. How many evidence to prove that argument? And so I also was really interested in this space because this is the earliest point of contact for child welfare system involvement for children and families. And I wanted to understand what does that initial call really mean for children and families?

Teresa: One of the things that I enjoyed about your paper was the very hopeful summary at the beginning of it that really just sort of laid out what the status of mandatory reporting is in the U. S. And, just for the benefit of our listeners who may need a little bit of an updated primer on that, could you just lay out, what do we know from research in general about mandatory reporting here in the US.?

Melanie: Yeah, it’s an important question because there is a ton of research about mandatory reporting. And more than that, there are a ton of mandated reporters. Like, I’m an academic now, but I have been, I mean, I’m still a mandated reporter. I’ve been a mandated reporter in practice and teaching roles and even at the university level, I’m a mandated reporter. I think many of my friends and colleagues and loved ones are mandated reporters, but we have very little understanding of what that actually means because the definition of a mandated reporter is something that’s federalized. It happens at state and local levels.

And so, on the one hand, I think there’s a ton of research about mandated reporting, but on the other hand, it varies so much by position, by region, you know, by policy that we actually don’t know that much on the whole. So, I think on the local level, we have some really compelling evidence that The person who makes the call, the mandated reporter, who calls a case into the Child Welfare Agency, I think we already knew going into this paper, and we review some of this literature and evidence, that that is very predictive of how a case interacts with the system.

We know that, for example, cases that come in from medical professionals, there’s been evidence that indicates that those are more likely to be substantiated, and there’s, you know, potentially lots of reasons for that. We have also had other evidence from different states that indicates some contrasting evidence, right?

That maybe there is actually more risk if you have a case called in by a legal personnel or a police officer. And so I think the evidence is really mixed in terms of the exact story. But what we know is that person clearly plays an important role in the child welfare system. I think the other thing I’ll say about the existing evidence is that that evidence is primarily quantitative.

A lot of the stuff we review in the literature review of that paper is really quantitative evidence. And I think that’s pretty limited. I think future research really needs to deep dive more with some conversations with mandated reporters in the future.

Teresa: I think one of the things that your paper pointed out, and it’s the experience of CACs as well, is that educators make up the majority of mandatory reports and referrals into CPS. And, that’s across a number of studies. However, one of the things that piqued my own interest, because we’ve seen that literature kind of over and over, it’s not that surprising. Kids are there with them all day. those kinds of things would have even more contact than law enforcement or medical providers or anything else with families and kids. But for substantiation rates, it really differs. And so, can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think that there might be some surprises in store for people on that.

Melanie: Yeah, I think the education personnel piece is really interesting because even though they make up the majority of calls into the system, they are the least likely to be substantiated and they’re tied for the least likely to be result in foster care placement. And, that’s really interesting, right? If they’re making all of these calls, what is it there? Is it that case workers don’t trust their opinions? Is it that they see kids so much that they read into situations more? We’re really not quite sure what that piece is, but I do think it’s an important part of our discussion because they being the biggest point of referrals, if We see that many cases coming in from teachers.

I think that gives us some insight on, you know, if there is bias in reporting, or if there is early preventative intervention that could be done in child welfare practice, it may be that schools and teachers are a point of intervention that we should be thinking about. And, you know, in the overall trends that we look at in the data in this paper, paper, we see that referrals are increasing in general.

All right, they’re going up a little bit every year, but the biggest point of increase that we see is still in education personnel, primarily teachers. So it seems like this is a reality and the evidence that isn’t changing, but certainly something that we need to think about.

Teresa: So, you know, there’s a lot to unpack with when we’re talking about teachers and educators. One of the things that I was thinking of as I was reading that portion of your paper is, you point out something really helpful, which is that one of the reasons that it could be that you have more reports coming from teachers, but they’re lower quality, essentially, less likely to be substantiated, less likely to yield an out of home placement, may be that there’s no other alternative system to access services for kids. And I think, we all you know, I have been in a situation where we know a teacher, an educator, who sees that they need resources. And, I think it’s a point well taken that in the U. S. there may not be some other avenue to get those services paid for that child.

Melanie: I think that’s right. And, you know, in terms of the other points of professionals who are making referrals, people like social service personnel or mental health providers, right, those are folks that are seeing families in the context of them receiving some kind of service, right?

And so, even if they may have a concern about a family, they may look at a family and think there’s clearly some mental health challenges going on here, or there’s clearly some neglect and resource need. Right. But because they’re here in my office, we don’t need to intervene, right? Like this is what they need. And for a teacher, I think you’re right that in a lot of cases, their hands are tied. And in particular, as we’re seeing an increase in referrals, right, over the last several years. We know that economically, the average household is struggling right now with inflation, with job loss during the pandemic.

And, you know, we go back to 2008. So, even after the recession in 2008, and we see there’s lots of like big news stories about, well, this school opened up a food pantry or, you know, a school supply closet or whatever it may be. But there is really, on the whole, very little that I think teachers have the capacity to do where, like, really, this family needs a grocery gift card, or this family really needs some pro bono therapy, and a teacher can’t do that.

Teresa: They may have had their utilities turned off, so they can’t wash clothes, or, you know, they don’t have hot running water anymore, or I think there’s a lot of things that get wrapped up into neglect. Reports that may tie to some of the issues that you’re describing. I’m wondering, well, we’ll talk about implications in a minute, because I think there are potentially a lot of them, but as you went into the study itself, looking at the ties between who and how the reporting happens and whether or not things get substantiated and ultimately whether or not kids are placed in foster care,  what was your sort of baseline hypothesis going in?

Melanie: I think I kind of expected that we would see a low, comparatively, a low significance of referrals from teachers in particular, and I think my perspective on that as somebody who’s worked in public education was I think that the professional opinions of that particular field are, are really, you know, they’re gendered, um, and I think that they are opinions that are really grounded in perceptions of this, like, caring but, like, overtaxed, perception of teachers.

And so, I expected that, that that would be the case. And having worked, I’ve done other studies where I did direct interviewing and qualitative research with child welfare investigators in child welfare agencies, and I’ve heard their own perspectives in the ways they talk about teachers. And I just really was not surprised by that finding at all, given the ways that we as a society perceive and talk about the teaching profession.

I expected that we may see stronger associations with substantiation and or foster care placement from medical personnel. So the finding, of course, about medical personnel is not as strong though as like the social service personnel piece and substantiation, which was really interesting to me. I’m not quite sure why we see that result.

And then, of course, we see a strong association with legal or police personnel. And, that’s another one where I think that as a society, some of the ways that we perceive evidence is really tied to how we perceive these professions. For medical personnel, for legal personnel, these are professions that I think are very highly respected, are perceived as having very strong authority, which is quite different from the ways that we perceive teachers.

Teresa: One of the things that I was thinking about in reading it too is, you know, who are seeing what ages more frequently and the frequency with which they have contact with a specific child. So for a medical professional, if the child’s healthy, they’re not going to be seeing them many times in a given year to pick up on any signs or symptoms or anything else.

But certainly because of their medical training, it’s unsurprising that when they do make a report, it would be taken more seriously. And they have more frequent contact with very young children. And as your paper pointed out, there were higher substantiation rates overall. And because of concern, I think that when you’re dealing with kids who are three and younger, that also aligned with the child abuse fatality data that we see around the children most likely to be killed by abuse and neglect.

Melanie: Yes, absolutely. I think the finding around age was completely expected. Any analysis in child welfare, we see higher risk for severe injury or death for young children, but we also see higher rates of contact for young children, and I think it’s really because the fear and the concern about young children is very valid, that a three year old looks Who’s maybe dealing with severe neglect or resource need can’t weather that as well as a 14 year old could. And so, the age piece I think is really important and how that ties into medical personnel. That’s a really good point. I hadn’t really quite thought about it as much, but right. And you know, the first six years of a kid’s life, the first year, especially there’s doctor’s appointments every month.

And so, that’s when they’re seeing a lot of young children come in. I also think a point with the medical personnel as well is that if there’s an accusation of something like physical or sexual abuse that comes from a teacher, a child welfare caseworker has to get a medical opinion and they have to have a doctor do that screening.

Whereas if a doctor’s already called the case in, I think there’s some more authority attached to that. We don’t have to do more digging like a medical professional has already said that they see signs of this physical concern, for example.

Teresa: Oh, and interestingly enough, I’m assuming that there are some of these kids, probably many of them actually, that if they’re seen by a medical professional because of a concern, there’s a dual report because it doesn’t obviate the medical provider’s responsibility to make a report as well. So I wonder about the impact of that on your data. But aside from that, I’m just curious about, did you have anything in the data that surprised you? That you were like, this is not at all what I was expecting.

Melanie: Yeah. You know, I think that the finding that struck me the most in terms of the particular question around referral sources was the higher odds specifically of foster care placement for social service referrals.

That’s a point for me where I think that the rate of social service referrals is quite a bit lower than say educational personnel. But more than that, I see social service personnel as very broad term. That could be a TANF case worker or that could be somebody working at a food bank, right? But, I sort of perceive those workers as, you know, really being able to fill a need for families.

And so, if that need is being filled, does a referral need to be made? And so in particular, the idea that there’s not as strong of an association with a substantiated case, you get a call from a TANF caseworker and substantiation is lower than legal or medical personnel, but foster care placement is higher.

And I think similarly, when we look at the results in the analysis. by the maltreatment allegation type, the highest for foster care placement is neglect. And so, I think that there’s a really clear indicator in that particular result around social service personnel and neglect and the relationship between foster care placement.

I think there’s some discussion to be had about what the implications are of that for poverty, in particular. And then I’ll say one other finding that wasn’t, like, our primary interest was one of the control variables that we include is this prior maltreatment variable. We look at if a family has a prior maltreatment allegation record, does that predict their outcomes in any way?

And that’s really supposed to be able to hold that background content constant. in the analysis that we’re doing about referral sources. But the findings stand on their own, and we find that prior maltreatment is actually protective, meaning that families who have prior maltreatment are less likely to have a substantiation and a foster care placement, which was a really intriguing finding and resulted in some arguments between our research team.

There’s some existing evidence that agrees with our finding and disagrees with our finding. So, I think that there’s definitely still some analysis to be done. The way that we have hypothesized that result as of now is that families who have prior system contact, and that is just in general, if they’ve had a report, it doesn’t have to have been substantiated, it doesn’t have to have resulted in foster care placement, but any report that got screened in.

And, in a lot of states, having a screened in report, even if it doesn’t get substantiated, results in service referrals. In a lot of states, for example, you may have your investigation ongoing and the investigation caseworker is referring you to maybe counseling supports, is maybe referring you to tutoring for your child, or maybe has pointed you to a food bank that is a really good resource.

And so, our thought there is that having prior history may actually be giving families access to other points of service connections that are preventing real risk for maltreatment, in general. But I think the evidence is really mixed and we certainly didn’t expect to find that. So as a point for future research.

Teresa: Well, I think that child abuse professionals probably have lots of feelings and thoughts about why that would be true and and would love to see additional research on that point. I’m not sure that I have an equivalent confidence that it’s because you’re accessing so many services or the caseworkers have the resources in many cases, you know, I think food banks are so stretched right now, referring someone to something that’s an empty food barrel has only so much value and so  my own personal hypothesis is when services are limited, people simply accept fewer cases, whatever it is, because they know there’s no help to be had. And so, when you look at the time period that you’re examining,  it just makes me wonder how much of that is a factor and frankly, also family fatigue.

If you talk to caseworkers who’ve had some of the same families over and over again, that plays a real role. And so how you. examine those kinds of issues and studies is another question. But it’s one of those things which undoubtedly with some families, I think plays a role in whether or not they’re accepted for service again.

Melanie: I think that’s right. And, I also think I don’t have evidence to back up this hypothesis, but in future research, I would love to talk to families about it. I also wonder if families have been investigated previously, if they now know more about the system and they can navigate it more smoothly. Right. And I would imagine that is probably at least true in some cases, right? And so if you are able to say what a judge wants to hear or navigate services more smoothly, are you less likely then to have a substantiated case or a case result in foster care placement?

Teresa: I also think that, and I see this as A good thing that to the extent that the system can work informally with families and offer them services without having to create a long chain of court involvement, especially on lower level cases where a lot of it is lack of access to resources.

That’s a valuable thing in and of itself because we know that the intervention of the system with families. It’s traumatic in and of itself and creates additional side issues for them, especially in cases of neglect and other things where there’s not a risk of imminent physical harm to the child, which, of course, we’re all in support of having more intensive intervention in those cases. But I think just as a country, we’re still struggling with neglect and what to do about it. That’s effective, helpful. Not harmful. I don’t think we’ve reached an answer on that.

Melanie: Yeah, no, it’s definitely one of those issues where Frankly being in a country that does not have a robust social safety net I would say that is one of the biggest problems. I will point you to some exciting work happening right now at my current institution at the University of Illinois. We’re doing this study of income transfers for low risk families. In Illinois, we have this program called Intact Family Services, and it is a program essentially where maybe there’s a case that’s unfounded, but the caseworker has some concerns, or maybe there is a substantiated case, but it’s really a material neglect situation. And those families, as opposed to resulting in further court contact, they give them an intact caseworker. And that caseworker is supposed to work with the family to get them access to services and maybe help them get a job or better housing. And the goal, of course, is to prevent future system contact.

And so with this new study, we’re looking at giving families money, every month for a year and seeing does that reduce the re-contact with the system, does it improve children’s outcomes, parents mental health, and so on? We’re just getting started, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

Teresa: Oh my goodness, well you’ll have to come back and talk about it when that is done and published. DC is trying a similar experiment, where I am, and I’m just I am so fascinated by it and I hope it proves to be useful and that these things help because I think that to me that’s a more common sense intervention in many cases for some families. So we’ll see. I hope that common sense proves to be actually beneficial in the end, in this.

Melanie: Yeah. Very interesting. Me too.

Teresa: All right. So, this is a good segue into poverty, because I thought the paper also talked about that. And I think this is just one of the issues that is challenging to talk about. Because first of all, you don’t want to conflate neglect and poverty. But secondly, there’s a lot of literature on the fact that there is a role played by poverty in these cases.

And, we also know that because there’s. a piece of this that is connected to poverty, that this is also a driver, among other things, of a, of disproportionality. And so I think it’s just one of those hugely complex subjects, and I’d be interested to hear you talk a little bit about the role of poverty and the findings that you all had.

Melanie: Yeah, it’s an important question, and I will say one of the limitations of this particular data set is that this is an individual level data set, and what I mean by that is there’s one report per individual child, and we cannot control for that particular family’s household economic status, which is a really difficult thing.

There’s some variables in this data set that are like, Did the family access the safety net, for example, but there’s a high rate of missingness across different states and it’s just not a reliable measure. So what we did in this particular paper to think more broadly about poverty is we included the poverty rate in a child’s state as a control variable.

Which is more of just an aggregate measure of, okay, in an area where the poverty rate is higher, are we seeing more of these outcomes, more calls from certain people, and so on. And the interesting thing with that variable, it’s only significant for substantiation, so it’s not significant for foster care placement.

And it’s a pretty small effect. What we see with the state’s poverty rate, there is about a nine percent increase in the likelihood of substantiation with a one percent increase in the poverty rate at the state level. So there’s definitely an association. And I think we see the association also implied, as I mentioned earlier, in the results about neglect and in the results about social service personnel, right?

We know that the families that are getting referred from social service personnel are poor families, right? You’re probably not accessing the safety net or a food bank or something like that if you are middle class. And I think the point of poverty here is something that’s really important. And more than that, I think perceptions about poverty is something that we really need to tease out in future research, because we’re talking about who calls a referral into the system, and it’s really dependent on that particular individual worker’s perception. The teacher’s perception of a child who comes to school with dirty clothes, or the police officer’s perception of a teenager who’s walking around at seven o’clock at night, maybe unsupervised, and the perceptions of those situations, you know, it really depends on if a worker looks at that and thinks, this is maltreatment versus maybe mom doesn’t have a babysitter or mom’s working late, or maybe the washer and dryer broke and the family can’t afford to get it fixed and what we do with those perceptions and those potential biases is incredibly complicated, right?

How do we train people to think about this in a more nuanced way and to think about whether or not this is a genuine risk to the child’s safety, right? Because that should be the assessment that a mandated reporter’s making, but how people perceive what a true risk is, we know that it’s really racialized, it’s really classist, and those perceptions really vary by where you live, how you’ve been educated, and what your own positionality is.

Teresa: It’s also very much impacted by whether or not you think the caregiver is to blame For the fact that these things are missing, because I think when  professionals feel that it is beyond the control of the caregiver,  there’s sort of a taking that into account that one sees. And it would be very interesting to get at some of the attitudinal issues, like what leads any of these professionals we’re talking about educators, medical professionals, law enforcement, CPS, whatever, what leads them to ascribe blame? Because that’s kind of the dividing line, I think, in terms of who gets reported and who doesn’t.

Melanie: I’m writing that down. What leads them to ascribe blame? Because I think that is definitely the key and that language you just used I feel like is very precise. That is something that I plan to look into in the future and it’s what I mentioned earlier, one of the big limitations of the evidence we have right now being quantitative is that we can’t tease out those processes and those perceptions in quantitative data. You really got to talk to people to do that. And I think that question of what leads them to ascribe blame is the key. And more than that, I think in the realm of blame with parents and poor parents in particular, we know that there are really, um, deeply problematic ways that people perceive deservingness, right?

Like maybe your family is really poor and you really do need some more help, but do we perceive you as deserving that help or do we perceive you as deserving punishment and having your kids taken away? And the line there is very fine and very blurry and I think it’s It is really ingrained in us as a society to largely perceive low income parents as undeserving.

There’s lots of literature on that in the poverty policy space. But I think in particular, we know that the ways that we ascribe blame and perceive deservingness are also really racialized. And if you’re a white mom versus a Black mom in the same situation, that the Black mom is probably going to have more punitive interactions with a case worker than the white mom is.

And there’s lots of evidence qualitatively about that in child welfare. So I think some of my future goals with this research on referral sources is to have the time to sit down and do qualitative research with these mandated reporters, because I think you’re right. How they make those decisions. If it’s racialized, if it’s, you know, You know, policy and practice in that organization.

If it’s really their, their educational background or their personal identities, understanding where that may come from, I think is a key piece to understanding how we might interrupt bias in the child welfare system in the future.

Teresa: As we were talking, I was just thinking about the implications for mandated reporter training, because I think that there’s so much of it that goes on and our children’s advocacy centers are very involved in it.

And I think that a lot of it is and should be centered around your ability to recognize signs of abuse and those kinds of things. But I think if we don’t address some of the attitudinal issues and biases, I wonder if we’re not missing First of all, a key opportunity to help people recognize that they can have bias, because I think that if you just pose the question about someone’s bias, it’s like, no, not me, no, you know, but helping people be able to recognize that in themselves, that what may be holding them back or spurring them on may not strictly be the objective child in front of them, but maybe driven by other things, I think, is an interesting thing.

I’m just curious about, and this has nothing to do with your paper, but just, have you seen mandatory reporter training that you felt got at some of the issues that are addressed in your paper in an effective way?

Melanie: That’s a great question. And, uh, no, so I’ve been a mandated reporter in three different states now in California and Washington State and Illinois for public and private agencies.

I’ve done lots of different trainings. Every single one of them is totally different. Like, they’re all different companies and different nonprofits. And not a single one has ever mentioned bias. You know, and I’ve been doing these trainings since probably like roughly 2012  ish, you know, so more than 10 years.

And my most recent one, I actually, so, you know, I did my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. And as an instructor there, you are a mandated reporter. Some of our students are minors, for example, and some of our students are parents. And I was doing the training for that was mandated for this year while I was writing this paper.

And I actually took screenshots of it because I think some of the bias is baked in to how we talk to people about what is neglect. The definition of neglect is really implies poverty. And if you aren’t familiar with the challenges of this public system, you’re not going to know to look for that as a mandated reporter.

Why would you? And so I think in your organization and others, I do think that is a future place where we might really think about, can we include some of these concerns about bias in the point of referral? You know, in the research that I’ve done with frontline caseworkers,  When we talk about, my research is really focused on biases of poverty and race and location.

And when I talk to caseworkers about that, they hone in on the fact that there’s bias in the referrals that they get and they can see it. They’re like, this kid is poor and that’s why they called it in. And what are we doing about that? And I think they’re right that these caseworkers have to take trainings on implicit bias and systemic racism and whether or not those trainings are effective is a whole other conversation, but they have to do them. And, we know that the majority of mandated reporters, I think, are not getting training about that piece.

Teresa: You know, I was also thinking as you were talking, because I’ve I’ve read many of the definitions of neglect in state statutes, which do vary, but as you point out, and well, first of all, they were written most of them 40 or 50 years ago and have not been updated substantially since.

And so, they reflect the biases of their time too. But secondly, some of them almost squarely fit.  a material lack of resources. And if you are teaching people, which any mandatory reporter training is going to be, what does the law say the definition is? And the law itself says, this is what you should be looking for.

Then I think it’s not a mystery why we’re getting the results that we are. And I think that there’s a public policy implication to all of this, just beyond kind of, local training efforts. Maybe it’s a time to take a fresh look at some of the laws around neglect to make sure that we aren’t baking into the system the fact that if someone presents with poverty they’re just automatically going to meet the textbook definition within that state.

Melanie: I think that’s right, and I think that’s the biggest concern that I, as a researcher, have had with poverty is that, you’re right, it varies by state, it even varies by county, depending on how the system is run, but I think the overarching definition of neglect that a lot of people run with is really a lack of adequate food, shelter, or clothing.

That is largely poverty. And I think it comes back to what you mentioned earlier about what leads us to ascribe blame to someone. Because I think the difference between poverty and neglect is, do you have these resources and you’re deliberately withholding them from your child intentionally, or do you not have access to these resources and that’s why your child does not have adequate food, shelter, or clothing.

And I think it’s really hard for mandated reporters to tease out those differences. And I think how they decide to ascribe blame or assume that a parent had the capacity to provide something to their child is, again, something that is racialized dependent on lots of perceptions about socioeconomic status and social identity.

Teresa: And I think that because unlike in some countries and the U. S., you know, schools don’t have school social workers, right? You might have a school counselor if you’re lucky or a school nurse, although some of those positions have been cut too. But the likelihood that you’re going to have a school social worker that you can turn to and go, Oh my gosh, this kid is hoarding food.

He’s hungry every day. He never has anything to eat. He reports he hasn’t had any food in 24 hours. I mean, that’s a legitimate concern. But if you don’t have anyone who can say, Let me find help. Then, who are you going to call? And I think that social services is it. Because it is. The only resource you have for ensuring that child has it.

And so, I think we’ve put educators in a really tough position on some of this just by the way that we’ve organized our society and our educational system, honestly. So, I think that there’s a lot of room that we all have to advocate for a better safety net for kids and families. And, frankly, a more sensible environment for teachers to be operating in, if they’re expected to report to.

Melanie: I think that’s true. And I do think it actually really goes beyond teachers. I know teachers are a big piece of it and seeing children every day. But I’ll give you an example of a, a parent that I did some qualitative field work with in the last year who their child had an eating disorder and they were seeking mental health treatment for their child.

And they were middle income.  You know, deeply impoverished, they were using private insurance, but they couldn’t afford to pay out of pocket and this therapist that they were seeing wouldn’t take their insurance and the mom had been searching for somebody that would take their insurance to keep getting their child treatment and couldn’t find anybody and eventually, you know, had to stop doing the services and the mental health provider called the case in and resulted in it an investigation and a year long battle with the Child Welfare Agency, and it was really over  material resources that this mom could not afford to get these services on her private insurance. And I’m sure that same provider probably wouldn’t have taken Medicaid. And so, I think it really just comes down to, like, even when you call this case in, right, like, CPS wasn’t able to get this child accessible services either.

And if a teacher calls a case in because a kid’s not eating, it doesn’t fix the fact that maybe that family, you know, can’t, uh, access SNAP for some reason. Maybe they’re an immigrant family. Maybe they’re just, you know, 5 over the benefit eligibility amount per month to be eligible for food stamps. Those families are still struggling just as much as families who are just below the line, right?

And so, I think there’s only so much reporters can do, but there’s also only so much that CPS can do in a country where we don’t have a robust safety net for families.

Teresa: That was one of the more depressing and accurate summaries  I’ve heard in a while. No, I mean, it’s, it’s so true. It’s so true. We’re missing some key things that, were they in place, we’d have a more humane system for kids and families and for all of us too.

Well, we’ve talked about many things today. I’m wondering if there’s anything  that I should have asked you and didn’t, or anything else that you really wanted to make sure that we talked about today.

Melanie: Yeah, one thing that I think is really intriguing about this study, but is sort of a small piece, but it’s something that I, I want to look into more in the future. So, I’m going to bring it up, is one of the things we looked at is the administrative structure of the child’s, um, child welfare system of the state that they live in. And this is something that I’ve been telling all of my colleagues that study child welfare, like we have to start controlling for this because, and now I’ve, I added this variable into several different studies, and I am finding the same thing, which is a little bit concerning.

And that is that state administered systems, which is the majority, um, it’s about two thirds of the country are state administered and a third are county administered. Those systems have higher rates of investigations, they have higher rates of substantiations, they have higher rates of foster care placement.

They also, I will say, in research I’ve done on youth in foster care, have higher rates of service uptake for youth in foster care. So it’s not all bad, but I think the way that I have been thinking about this is that state administered child welfare systems really seem to be more efficient, that they get more done in whatever aspect of the system they’re working in. And this paper finds the same thing, right? We see a really significant relationship, particularly with foster care placement and state administered child welfare systems. It’s like 165% increase in the likelihood of foster care placement if a child lives in a state administered state.

That’s huge. It’s massive. And so I think that’s something that we also really need to be having a conversation about in the broader national child welfare discussion of how is the ways that we structure these policies and services impacting how families interact with this system. Um, and it seems like in county run systems where maybe missing more families or case workers are more overburdened or overtaxed or on state run systems, maybe they’re over analyzing families and over surveilling families and there’s probably a middle ground in there somewhere.

I’m not really sure. And, I think this is another place where some qualitative research with child welfare policymakers is in order, but it’s a really interesting finding that I think kind of goes under the radar because it’s not the main point of the paper, but it’s something I’m finding a lot more in other research as well.

Teresa: It is really interesting, and you know, I think that often we think that by sort of having larger systems, and especially there’s been efforts to try to use lots of different decision trees and other mechanisms to reduce the impact of bias. But the other thing it does is reduce the impact of personal judgment.

And I wonder if in county based systems, because many of those systems aren’t inhabited by people who actually know the families they’re serving,  because if you can make a judgment call to say, I know this family, the kid’s not really in danger, it’s just  not a great situation, you might let that pass.

Whereas in a state run system, you’re not going to know anything about that family. And so maybe you are applying things more fairly in one sense, but it’s sweeping many more people into the system applying the same solution. So I’m curious, as you explore this more, you’ll be able to test lots of different hypotheses about why that’s so.

Melanie: I think that’s right. And the other thing I’ve thought a lot about a piece of my own research that I have been really interested in is how urbanicity is shaping child welfare outcomes.

Teresa: That’s interesting.

Melanie: If you live in an urban area versus a suburban area versus a rural area, how is your income, your resource needs, your race? So, your employment status, how are those things perceived differently? And one of the challenges I think with urbanicity and in a state run system is that it’s like you said, they have these evenly applied rules and statutes. And so in Illinois, for example, this is a state run state and in the rural areas, I had caseworkers say to me, it is really challenging because according to state statute, I have to terminate this parent’s rights.

But I was not able to access needed nonprofit services. Like this family really needs a behavioral health intervention. They need substance abuse treatment. And in this rural area, we don’t have it. And the state doesn’t see the unique challenges of this particular region. And I think in a county run system, That caseworker probably still doesn’t have access to the services they really need for families because it’s a deeply rural area that’s under resourced.

The caseworker might have a little bit more regional discretion of being able to say, look, our hands are tied in this situation and we’re not going to terminate parental rights yet. We’re going to wait a little longer and see if we can get some service out of the county or something. So that’s another really key piece that it may be applied policy evenly in a state run system, but we know that there are some really distinct challenges depending on where families live and where caseworkers practice.

Teresa: Well, and cultural judgments about some of these things are very different based on rurality or urban status. I think that the tolerance for  children managing periods of time alone, even at younger ages, I’m not talking about absurdly young, but that perception of that is definitely different in rural areas versus urban when you’re looking at issues of supervision.

So I think that there just are some. Yeah, there are some differences that might actually make a difference in looking at these things.

Melanie: Yeah.  Local politics too is a piece of that culture is something that I found in my own work. Like, you know, if you’ve got if you live in a deeply rural area, there’s one family court judge, and that judge is making the decisions about every case that the child welfare agency sends in.

And in a lot of the areas that I have been in that one judge tends to be pretty conservative and tends to be pretty keep the government out of my business. right? That’s kind of the perception of rural areas. And so, in those instances, caseworkers hands may be tied in a really different way, that they may be recommending foster care placement or court ordered services, and they may be facing geographic barriers to, to doing that. So, it’s a really interesting piece that I think we really need to think more about, um, is that urbanity question.

Teresa: Oh, definitely. And I also wonder about just sort of informal family networks to what extent and rural communities there’s more taking into account,  not only the extended family, but the community itself acting as a second family to kids, um, who need some additional support.

And there are lots of informal relationships that spring up that are not going to be on any social workers checklist ofiItems. But if you’re in a small area, this kid is being mentored by this person. You know that they’re involved in a faith community, that faith community is taking care of their needs, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You know, it goes on and on. And that is going to stand really differently than an environment where that might not be the case or whether the case workers are so busy, they couldn’t even register any of that if it was true. So I think that You know, you’re never going to be out of a job researching is what I want to say.

There’s so many research questions and so little time. So, thank you for bringing all of these very interesting points up to our audience. I know our listeners are going to be fascinated and just really appreciate the work you’re doing and hope, especially when you are done with your study on that direct income piece that you’ll come back and talk about that.

Melanie: Yes, we would be happy to share. I’m sure it’s an exciting piece. So, I really appreciate your time. This has been super-interesting conversation and I really enjoyed it.

Teresa: Thanks for listening to One in Ten. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. For more information about this episode or any of our others, please visit our podcast website at oneintenpodcast.org.